He sighed again. In a quiet way, he was afraid he believed in right and wrong. His idea of tidiness was not the same as other peoples. It was the rest of the world that was out of step. That was his core belief and it sustained him. The rest of the world disagreed, but it knew, too, that they marched to a different tune.
Which was why he had to go and have further talks with little Allgood, and sort out the new loose ends the writer had exposed. He would not be thanked for it; it would lead nowhere; but it still had to be done.
TWENTY-THREE
No one liked Martin Allgood. This mattered comparatively little, since you weren’t supposed to like Martin Allgood and he worked hard at making affection a matter of indifference to him. In this, he nearly always succeeded. Contractor obviously didn’t care for Allgood, but he was too professional to let this interfere with his report.
Allgood had always been unpopular. In fact, it was virtually his stock-in-trade. At school he had been the school swot, pimpled with acne. School, according to the file, was a grammar school somewhere in Essex. Bognor was very bad at the geography of that county, though he shared the popular prejudice against it. He thought of the county – wrongly of course – as an urban sprawl dominated by Epping Forest, Leyton Orient Football Club and boxers training in Tudorbethan pubs, watched by criminals of a certain age in vicuna overcoats, which they didn’t remove even in oppressive heat. Males from Essex did not remove their hats indoors, and once you had made a few million you smoked large Havanas, lived in a gated community and made champagne cocktails with Dom Perignon and good cognac. It did not matter that Essex was not like that, nor that Allgood was in any way typical. Essex was not Essex, and Allgood was a one-off.
After grammar school, Allgood had been to the local university where he read sociology and got a very good degree. At about this time, Allgood had his first and only book published. This was called, with a mock-genuflection in the direction of Charles Dickens and a rare modesty, Minimal Expectations. What about Rubbish? Fact or fiction? Or a mixture of both? Or a prose poem? Or a novella? No one seemed quite sure, but it had earned Allgood a place on the ‘Goodbooks’ list of ‘Twenty-Five Best Young British Novelists’, and the undying hatred of all good men and true. The comparatively few words of Minimal Expectations were arguably the last Allgood wrote, or at least, the last which were issued between hard covers.
He remained, to the world at large, a writer of almost infinite promise. The tabloids hung on his every word; his opinions sought; and his views earned golden opinions and fat fees. He had a view on everything and everyone, and many people despised him for obvious reasons.
Bognor was happy to be among those who disliked the idea of Allgood, but he was the first to acknowledge that this didn’t make him a murderer. He was unpleasant enough, certainly, but Bognor knew this wasn’t enough in itself. Opportunity? Well, yes. Motive? Motive would have to be mildly abstract, because there was no evidence that Allgood and Sebastian had ever met. On the other hand, Allgood was an atheist, a paid-up member of the Dawkins’ camp. However, he had none of Dawkins’ Balliol-bred tolerance and understanding, but was on the extreme wing of the atheist tendency. He made common ground with the sort of animal lover who hated humans, and was happy to trash laboratories and kill those who worked for him. In the case of Allgood, churches were fair game and so were vicars.
He found little Allgood in the garden of the Two by Two, aka the Fludd Arms. He was smoking what would once have been called a ‘gasper’, and which seemed the most apposite word for the thin, self-rolled cigarette which was stuck to his lower lip. He had on corduroy bags and an open-necked shirt with a sleeveless pullover, and in front of him was a glass of vivid pink liquid, which was bubbling away like a hookah. The on dit was that Allgood drank. Despite the sun, which was bright, it was chilly. The author looked as if he should have been wearing a floppy bow-tie, but a tie would have interfered with his overall appearance, which was deliberately dishevelled. Almost poetic; certainly raffish. The drink should have been absinthe.
‘I’m sorry I missed you,’ said Bognor. ‘I’m told you were very good, but duty called.’
‘Sorry about that. Quite understand though. Business before pleasure and all that rot, though I have to say that the older I get, the more I come to believe that nothing should ever get in the way of pleasure. Certainly, nothing as vulgar as business. Can I get you a tincture?’
Bognor wondered why everyone suddenly seemed to be talking funny. He felt as if he were in the Americas or Down Under. The natives spoke a form of English but it wasn’t quite the same. He guessed it was not Allgood’s first pink drink of the day. Nor would it be his last.
‘Thank you, but no,’ he said, aware that he sounded prim, as if he never touched the stuff himself. ‘I won’t keep you a moment.’
‘Take a pew though,’ said Allgood, patting the seat of the chair alongside him invitingly. It was stylish yet comfortable, made of some kind of thatch, probably worth a fortune. Bognor did as he was bade and sat.
‘A young black man came up to me in the supermarket the other day… I practically embraced him,’ said Allgood unexpectedly. Bognor did not know what to say, but looked nonplussed, which he was.
‘Sorry,’ said Allgood, ‘Joanna Trollope talking on TV. I caught it by mistake and have been knocking it around in case I can think of something.’
‘You writing something?’ asked Bognor. It seemed a sensible, pleasant conversational gambit.
‘Nah,’ said Allgood. ‘Not really. Not books. That’s a mug’s game.’
‘What, then?’ Bognor was genuinely curious. He had Allgood down as a writer of books. A novelist. ‘Fiction? Fact?’
‘Bit of both,’ said Allgood. ‘I remember years ago, a poet saying he couldn’t write anything for some literary magazine because he couldn’t afford to. Also, it would jeopardize his reputation as someone who had real trouble grappling with his daemons and fighting the dreaded block. If he published, he might lose his grant from the Arts Council and the local authority; might get fewer gigs. Might be regarded as, you know, commercial. He’d be thought popular. In the mainstream. Fatal. Should have realized at the time.’
‘Sorry,’ said Bognor, ‘you’ve lost me.’
‘I’m famous as a novelist,’ explained Allgood, talking as if to a small child, ‘but it’s much more lucrative to do things like this.’ He smiled and waved around in an expansive manner. ‘Not to mention fun.’
As if on cue, Vicenza Book entered left and sat down at their table. She looked as if she had just got out of bed, smiled and nodded at Bognor, and kissed the novelist proprietorially on the lips. ‘Hi, sweetie,’ she said, giving every impression of being the female half of an item.
Nothing much surprised Bognor any more, but he felt obliged to say, ‘I thought you had a publicist with you? Tracey or something?’
Allgood thought for a moment. ‘You’re right,’ he said, after a while. ‘She had to go back to London. Vicenza here has stepped into her breach, as it were.’ He laughed. ‘Haven’t you, darling?’
Vicenza simpered, and Bognor had vague thoughts of killing two birds with a single stone. He was impossibly old-fashioned. Time he retired. But even so.
‘You’re saying you’ve retired from writing books?’